Cloud News, Resources and Information
Infrastructure as a Service is one of the three delivery methods of cloud computing (the other two are Platform as a Service and Software as a Service).
Users of IaaS have the expertise to maintain operating systems and applications, but don’t wish to purchase server, storage and networking hardware and a datacenter to house the hardware. The cloud provider provides these services from a shared pool. The cloud user will then use the virtual machines to fulfill their computing requirements and may install their own operating system and will install their own applications on the virtual machines…
Virtualization startup Virtustream has raised $15 million in funding from Intel Capital, Columbia Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, TDF and QuestMark Capital. This brings Virtustream’s total funding raised to $75 million.
Virtustream provides strategy, integration and managed services utilizing virtualization technologies, and xStream, the company’s cloud provisioning platform. xStream platform was built to address the exacting requirements of enterprise customers as they move their IT and applications to the cloud…
Microsoft on Friday cut pricing on its Azure storage as you go service and its extra small compute effort. The move comes just a few days after Amazon Web Services cut its pricing.
What’s it all mean? Cloud computing costs are falling fast for IT buyers and are already on par with electricity rates. And given that electricity rates fluctuate based on natural gas prices, season and other variables cloud computing could be cheaper…
Software as a service and cloud computing are two terms which are quite becoming popular in the world of computing. These two concepts have a positive outcome in the industry by making use of the internet to beat the conventional computing strategies. Although both concepts have similarities, they offer different services.
Software as a service applications have no huge upfront costs and even do not require upkeep and maintenance. They are often offered for lease to business owners and are accessed remotely through web browsers connected to the internet. Business owners save money because they only pay for software they need and do not have to worry about managing renewal fees, patches, and updates which are often identified with onsite applications…
A recent Microsoft study predicts that nearly 14 million new jobs will be created worldwide by 2015 as a result of growing cloud computing adoption. Whether you believe that number or not, (and InformationWeek‘s Rob Preston says it’s clearly inflated,) there’s no doubt that cloud is reshaping the IT department as we know it.
While cloud computing promises to stimulate the job market, it could be a buzz kill for your marketability as an IT professional. "There’s no question cloud computing is generating a whole new breed of job seeker," says Jeff Kaplan, founder and managing director of THINKstrategies, an IT strategic consulting firm. "What this new world is about is fundamentally different than the old IT world."…
Within two months, Hewlett-Packard will offer a large and powerful cloud computing service similar to Amazon Web Services, but with more business-oriented features, according the head of the project.
“We’re not just building a cloud for infrastructure,” said Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of H.P.’s cloud services. “Amazon has the lead there. We have to build a platform layer, with a lot of third-party services.” Among the first software applications available as part of the Hewlett-Packard cloud, he said, will be both structured and unstructured databases, and data analytics as a service…
The division of Sony that suffered a cyberattack last year, which led to a major PlayStation network outage and sensitive customer data being compromised, has dropped Amazon Web Services for at least a portion of its cloud hosting and computing in favor of an OpenStack platform hosted by Rackspace.
Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) — which manages popular games such as "Grand Theft Auto IV" and "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare" — made the move away from AWS after a series of highly publicized performance issues, according to an email from a public relations firm representing Rackspace…
Telefónica, in collaboration with Cisco and VCE, has launched a regional advanced cloud hosting service in Latin America for the corporate market segment. According to Cisco Systems, the service is called Virtual Hosting 2.0, the first tailored cloud computing service offered regionally supported by the VCETm Vblock platform, the strongest in the market in terms of integrated virtualization, server, storage, networking and security technologies with end-to-end support.
The service will be offered from five interconnected data centers in Latin America, with integrated management and provision. These data centers are in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru, and from there they can also provide service to the rest of Latin American countries where Telefónica operates…
Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services is heralding the era of utility supercomputing, whereby massive computational resources and storage requirements can be accessed on demand.
Speaking at the launch of Intel’s Xeon E5 processor family in London this week, AWS technology evangelist in residence, Dr. Matt Wood, said that cloud computing was a utility service like electricity and gas, in that it allows consumers and businesses to pay for consumption of a service on demand…
There’s a fundamental blind spot many organizations experience when adopting clouds. This blind spot is the failure to properly govern the people, processes and management systems that deploy applications and data to the cloud. The impact goes well beyond basic risk management, and actually extends into successful cloud adoption and realizing the full cost and agility benefits from cloud initiatives.
Cloud Risks at your Doorstep
For many business units, the desire to rush into the cloud seems irresistible, and publicly available, credit card-accessible cloud services add fuel to this fire. However, reckless on-ramping to cloud computing doesn’t sit well with corporate IT. IT managers know there are very real and dangerous consequences when data gets exposed, services go down, regulations get violated, backup plans are overlooked and a myriad of other IT safeguards get ignored. Insufficient control over who can provision a workload to the cloud, where it can be deployed, for how long and at what cost or capacity is a recipe for disaster…